Victims and survivors: A grandfather who 'helped everyone' and a man who played dead to fool assailant

A grandfather who regularly went to the airport to greet refugees, an academic researcher, and a four-year-old who came from a family of Somali refugees, were among the victims identified Friday in a deadly mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

According to a chilling live stream video that captured part of the attack, a worshipper at the entrance to the Masjid Al Noor mosque greeted the approaching gunman with a “Hello, brother,” before the heavily armed attacker unleashed a torrent of bullets.

Forty-one people were killed at that mosque and another seven at the Linwood Masjid mosque. One person died at hospital.

The dead, injured or missing hailed from across the Middle East and South Asia, including Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, officials said.

Daoud Nabi. (Omar Nabi/Facebook)Facebook/Omar Nabi

Daoud Nabi was shot and killed when he apparently threw himself in front of another worshipper at the Al Noor mosque, his son, Omar Nabi, told NBC News.

“I’m a bit lost,” he said. “He is a man of lots of knowledge, and I’ve been his student for a long time.”

Omar, a mechanic, told NBC from a local hospital that he ran to the mosque as soon as he heard there had been a shooting. He tried calling his father but the phone kept ringing.

The Nabi family immigrated to New Zealand from Afghanistan in the 1980s to flee the Soviet Union’s invasion, Omar told the network. His father, an engineer, founded a mosque and had nine grandchildren.

His sister, Roushan, also paid tribute to their father on Facebook, writing: “My father so kind and giving, gave his last breath to the people.”

Four Pakistani nationals were wounded and five others were missing, a foreign ministry spokesman tweeted.

Bangladesh’s honorary consul in Auckland told reporters three Bangladeshis had perished and at least four others were injured. One person’s leg had to be amputated and another had a gunshot wound to the chest.

One of the dead was identified by multiple Bangladeshi news organizations as Abdus Samad, who was working at Lincoln University in New Zealand and had previously taught at Bangladesh Agriculture University.

Nasif Sarowar, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in salmon farming at Dalhousie University, told the Truro Daily News in Nova Scotia that he had once worked alongside Samad. Both men hail from Bangladesh.

“It’s a loss to the world – he was a scientist,” Sarowar said after Friday prayers at the Truro mosque.

Bangladeshi media outlets identified another victim as Husne Ara Parvin, who apparently was rushing over to her wheelchair-bound husband in another part of the Al Noor mosque when she was shot.

Police continue to search for evidence on Deans Avenue near the Al Noor Mosque on March 16, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand.Fiona Goodall/Getty Images

A reporter for The Daily Star newspaper in Bangladesh interviewed one of the injured as he lay on a hospital bed in Christchurch. Mohtasim Billah said he heard a sound that he initially thought was a short circuit.

“But the sound kept coming and people ran out of the mosque,” he was quoted as saying.

“The gate of the mosque is small and not many people can come out through it at a time. I was crammed at the door with others when a bullet hit my thigh and I fell on the floor.”

One of the youngest victims was a 4-year-old boy, who came from a family of refugees who fled Somalia in the mid-1990s. Abdulrahman Hashi, a Muslim preacher in Minneapolis, told the Washington Post that the boy was his nephew.

He said the boy’s father had been worshipping with his five children when the gunfire erupted. None of the other children was hurt.

“You cannot imagine how I feel,” he was quoted as saying. “He was the youngest in the family.”

Two Jordanians were killed and several more injured, that nation’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement. Among the injured was Mohammed Elyan, who teaches engineering at a university in New Zealand and co-founded one of the targeted mosques in 1993, The Associated Press reported. His son, Atta, was also injured.

“He used to tell us life was good in New Zealand and its people are good and welcoming,” said Elyan’s brother, Muath. “He enjoyed freedom there and never complained about anything.”

I never thought in my life I would live to see something like this

Passerby Jill Keats tended to one of the injured victims outside the Al Noor mosque. Keats told the BBC she was driving when she saw two men running down the street.

At first, she thought she was hearing firecrackers.

“Then all of a sudden it got quite violent … and they started falling,” she told the network. “One fell just to the left of my car. And one fell to the right.”

Keats said she helped one of the men take cover behind her car and applied pressure to his wound.

“I kept talking to him and telling him that (his wife) was at the hospital waiting and he wasn’t to give up and, yeah, we just kept pressure on and did the best we could for him until we got him some help.”

The second man passed away, she told the BBC.

“I’m 66 and I never thought in my life I would live to see something like this. Not in New Zealand.”

Malaysia said two of its citizens were hospitalized. One of the injured, Penangite Rahimi Ahmad, 36, played dead in order to survive, a friend told the New Straits Times.

“Rahmi is injured, but he acted as if he was dead,” the friend told the newspaper.

The New Zealand Red Cross published a list online with the names of people who had been declared missing by loved ones.